Contract Data Scientist - Search / Ranking / Recommendation

Contract Data Scientist - Search Order / Ranking / Recommendation

£480/day | Outside IR35 | 3-4 months | Remote / Hybrid

I'm working with a major consumer travel business looking to bring in a hands-on Data Scientist to support a project focused specifically on search order, ranking and recommendation.

The business manages a large inventory of holiday properties, and the core problem is deciding which properties should appear, in what order, for a given customer search.

This is not a generic Data Science role. Previous experience with search ranking / sort order / recommendation systems is essential.

The role will involve:

• Improving the search order / ranking logic used to surface properties to customers
• Building and refining recommendation and ranking models
• Working across ranking by destination, country, brand, park and individual property / unit level
• Running A/B tests and experiments to measure the impact of ranking changes
• Measuring performance against customer and commercial KPIs
• Analysing how factors such as price, brand, region and country affect sort order performance
• Building out a broader dashboard / KPI framework
• Working with behavioural and transactional data
• Feeding findings and recommendations back to product and business stakeholders

Essential experience:

• Hands-on experience with search ranking / search order / sort order
• Hands-on experience with recommendation / recommender systems
• Strong Python and SQL
• Snowflake
• AWS
• Strong A/B testing / experimentation
• Experience measuring ranking or recommendation changes against commercial KPIs
• Strong hands-on Data Science background

Nice to have:

• Learning-to-rank / re-ranking
• Metaflow
• XGBoost / LightGBM
• Propensity modellingOptimisation
• PyMC
• Streamlit
• Cold-start recommendation
• Travel, ecommerce, marketplace or booking-platform experience

Contract: 3-4 months
Rate: £480/day
IR35: Outside IR35
Location: Remote / Hybrid

Desired Skills and Experience

• Strong hands-on Python and SQL
• Experience building search ranking, sort-order or recommendation systems
• Experience with learning-to-rank, re-ranking or personalisation
• Strong Snowflake and AWS experience
• Experience working with large-scale behavioural and transactional data
• Strong A/B testing and experimentation background
• Able to measure model changes against commercial KPIs
• Experience building dashboards / KPI frameworks and feeding findings back to stakeholders
• Comfortable working as a hands-on individual contributor across the full Data Science lifecycle
• Ideally experience within travel, ecommerce, marketplaces, booking platforms or other consumer businesses

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